What does the ultra popular series "Succession" teach us about corporate culture?
I just recently finished the series and loved it. But the politics involved made me wanna barf.
So I just recently finished the HBO series, Succession. I’d heard about it for years and it seemed to be one of the favorite shows of many folks in Silicon Valley.
And quite honestly I loved it. The acting and story is just amazing.
And it has an IMDB score of 8.9, which puts up there with the greats like “Breaking Bad”.
But if you haven’t watched it and plan to…then you may wanna stop here. Because i’m going to ruin the ending for you.
The 30-second Recap on Succession
So basically the story revolves around a family that owns a major old-school media giant that is worth billions of dollars. They say that it is modelled after Rupert Murdoch’s “News Corp”.
And you can definitely see many parallels. In that Rupert owns the Fox News network that helped get Donald Trump… and in the show Waystar owns ATN, which is kind of the Fox equivalent.
And ATN helps the Republican candidate get elected near the end of the show… a politician with some similarities to Mr. Trump.
Rupert is also known for having a family where there has been a fair bit of strife between members. Which is essentially the main plot of the Succession series, ie. family members cutting each others’ throats for power.
But i’m not really going to focus on all of that. Rather I’m going to focus on the character Tom who you see here below.
I found the character, “Tom”, to be your classic “corporate guy”
Tom is the ass kisser. The guy whose loyalties bend with whatever way the wind is blowing.
He’s married to Shiv Roy, the daughter of Logan Roy (the owner). And he’s a complex character that is at times evil, at times emotional and conservative (like when he doesn’t want to have an ‘open relationship’ with Shiv, and at times principled.
But he ends up backstabbing his own wife to get into the good graces of the owner, Logan, when she and her brothers plan a rebellion.
And then later backstabs again by making a deal with the acquiring CEO, Lukas Matsson, to be the CEO instead of her.
His bosses love him because he does what is told. He’s a good “dog” so to speak. And he himself is proud of that fact.
Tom becoming “CEO” in the end is a testament to how leverage-based organizations work
You see Tom in my view would make an absolute horrible entrepreneur. The guy, left to his own devices, creates little value.
He doesn’t know how to “build”. Rather he is good at manipulating and managing, ie. telling people what to do and then critiquing it.
When I was younger and worked with large corporates, I viewed the world the same way:
Whose good graces do I need to get into in order to gain leverage?
How do I ensure I have team members that are going to be ‘loyal’ over all else?
This is completely not how I see the world now. And not how I see a healthy organization functioning.
But it is totally how lots of large, leverage-based, organisations work.
And you almost need to choose… do you wanna play by those rules? Or do you wanna make your own rules?